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When you do a Google image search on energy efficiency, what comes up? You guessed it - a whole lot of CFL light bulbs. Our current visual vocabulary for energy efficiency is woefully inadequate for the task of inspiring Americans to save energy. Good visuals are essential to successful outreach…

People involved with advancing zero net energy (ZNE) buildings spend a lot of time talking about how much ZNE buildings cost—or don’t cost—in an effort to convince the building sector that ZNE is not as expensive as they might think. Given that perceived cost is one of the biggest barriers…

Oxford English Dictionary dubbed 2013 the year of the selfie. Experts predict nearly a trillion photos will be taken in 2014. With a camera in every smartphone, and Snapchat and Instagram growing gangbusters, one might think technology was fueling this photo boom. But our passion for pictures is as old…

Toledo drinking water ban should be a warning to other cities After a weekend of scrambling to find bottled water for drinking, cooking and other household uses, residents of northwestern Ohio and southwestern Michigan were told Monday that their tapwater is again safe to drink. But for how long? Toxic…

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average attention span is now just 8 seconds. That doesn’t give us a lot of time to engage website visitors before they lose interest and click elsewhere. Fortunately, the science that is tracking our shrinking attention spans also offers some insights…

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of President Clinton’s executive order on environmental justice, officially known as the Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations a result of Environmental equity grassroots movements of the 1980s. Milestones like this are to be celebrated cautiously,…

One of the training sessions I attended last Friday was called Five Secrets: The Proven Neuroscience Behind Persuading Voters, led by Stephanie Dreyer and Brandon Fureigh. I’ve never thought much about my hand gesturing when I am speaking to groups, as long as I don’t have arms flying in all…

A couple of years ago, political scientist Michael Jones published the results of a study in the Policy Studies Journal, on the most effective ways to educate and persuade the public about the threats of climate change. His research clearly demonstrated that when climate information is conveyed in narrative story…

Why talk about intrinsic worth when you can put a price tag on it? The idea of calculating the value of healthy natural systems and factoring that value into land management decisions is taking hold across the world. The idea is that with a better sense of how much these…

If you have a tendency to click on news items that might make you cry, you likely saw that hundreds of sea lions have been washing up- starving- on the shores of Southern California. I possess that tendency as well as some well-worn tear ducts. Within two minutes of reading…